


Lighthouse

by vega_voices



Series: You Are Like That, [8]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Brain Fog, Confessionals, Depression, Extreme Risk, F/F, F/M, Ice cream and fries, Season 5 Episode 3, Toby the Targ, tess gallagher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25705915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vega_voices/pseuds/vega_voices
Summary: “I’m …” she hiccuped. “I’m sorry I …” what was she really sorry for? Pushing him away? Hurting herself? Trying to feel something? Anything? What was going on in her own damned head?
Relationships: B'Elanna Torres/Joral Kreshi (OFC), Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres
Series: You Are Like That, [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1861696
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21





	Lighthouse

**Title:** Lighthouse  
**Author:** vegawriters  
**Fandom:** Star Trek: Voyager  
**Series:** You Are Like That,  
**Pairing:** B’Elanna Torres/Tom Paris; B'Elanna Torres/Joral Kreshi (OFC)  
**Rating:** Gen  
**Timeframe:** Extreme Risk (S 5, E 3)  
**A/N:** The title of the series is taken from Tess Gallagher’s poem of the same name. You can find it and all of those referenced in this series in the Dear Ghosts anthology.  
**Disclaimer:** I do not have any claim to Trek other than my own love of the characters. But, if they are looking for someone to write a series ...

 **Summary:** _“I’m …” she hiccuped. “I’m sorry I …” what was she really sorry for? Pushing him away? Hurting herself? Trying to feel something? Anything? What was going on in her own damned head?_

_Pain added to pain it would have been,  
to bring forward too soon  
the beautiful unripe “us together” scenes.  
So memory learned something from the dawn  
about getting night out of the way,  
letting dark be dark,  
like the white heart of the apple  
before it is broken open  
to the miniature damp cathedral of its  
even darker seeds.  
From: Black Beauty, by Tess Gallagher_

Anxious, feeling as if her skin was going to crawl all the way off her body and ball up in the corner all by itself, B’Elanna made her way into the holodeck and toward the small table where Tom was waiting. She knew he wasn’t really expecting her. It wasn’t like she’d been an equal factor in their relationship lately. Why the hell was he still with her? She was sure any number of the ensigns who were ready to climb him like a tree would make him happy.

But, then he looked up as she approached. And his eyes lit up and he smiled and she just wanted to throw herself at him. So, she did. She gave into everything she’d wanted to do for weeks and let herself cling to him. The emotions pushed through her with such force that she could feel him physically crack just slightly under the pressure of her embrace. She didn’t care. And clearly, he didn’t either. He held on and let her scream and she had never loved him more.

Eventually, the roar left her body and she came back to herself, realizing that Tom had maneuvered them to a nearby bench. She was bent over herself, her hands fisted in her belly, choking on tears. Desperate to catch her breath, B’Elanna was not sure the rage wasn’t going to shake her apart at the molecular level. To have allowed the door to open, to be daring the beast in her, she wasn’t sure she could stem the tide. But through the fog, she could feel Tom next to her, rubbing her back, and just weathering her storm. Kahless, she didn’t deserve him. She didn’t deserve him and he should just leave her be but if he walked out the door, she was sure she’d dissolve into nothingness.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped out, still quivering, still trembling with the release that had been four years coming. Since that damned alien had pulled them to the other side of the galaxy, running tests to alleviate its conscience. Since Janeway had made that damned decision. A decision that on most days she agreed with, until the news came from the Alpha Quadrant. She should have been there. She should have died next to those she fought with. Her friends were gone. Everyone was gone.

“Okay,” she heard Tom saying, and it was like he was speaking through the densest fog, “but for what because I want to make sure we’re on the same page here.”

It was still too fresh, too close. Everything hurt so much. But he didn’t push. He just sat there and let her shiver and cry and she loved him beyond measure and how had she pushed him away like this and why hadn’t she trusted him and she knew it was because she was so scared, so very scared, that she’d get called to sickbay only to race through the doors to find the Doctor calling time of death and no one would ever love her like Tom loved her and didn’t he know she needed him safe more than she needed him with her and please, he couldn’t go.

“I’m …” she hiccuped. “I’m sorry I …” what was she really sorry for? Pushing him away? Hurting herself? Trying to feel something? Anything? What was going on in her own damned head? Wiping her eyes, B’Elanna straightened up and looked around, realizing they were on the patio of his favorite coffee shop in Bucharest. Coffee waited in a carafe, pastries slowly went stale on thin blue plates. A single red rose had been placed in a vase just to the left of the center of the table. B’Elanna stood and walked over to the wire chairs, trailing her fingers along the metalwork, putting a shield between her and Tom. A dog slept near the patio entrance to the cafe and B’Elanna moved over, stroking the mastiff’s head. Tom waited. Damn him, he waited. So patient. How much time did they have left? How could they have this conversation with only a few minutes of time left to spare. “Can we go back to my quarters?” she finally asked. “This is lovely and I appreciate it so much but … I think this requires some good old fashioned pjs and ice cream.”

“It’s a deal,” he said, rising. B’Elanna stroked the dog’s head one last time before Tom cancelled the program. “We can come back later,” he promised, holding out his hand to her. B’Elanna linked their fingers and they walked in silence back to her quarters.

“I’m going to change,” she said as they came into the dim room. “Your pjs are in the drawer.”

He offered a smile as she rescued a tattered pair of leggings and an old tank top from under her pillow. “Glad to know they’re still here,” he said, his voice light but there was an undercurrent of tension. He was worried about them as a couple, a unit. Well, so was she.

The tone brought tears to her eyes but B’Elanna just ducked into the head, washing her face and changing out of the dress Tom liked into her safest pjs, the ones that didn’t make her feel sexy. She knew herself. She knew she’d hide behind wanting to climb on top of him and just forget everything and while that might come later, right now she just wanted the man she loved to hold her.

Emerging from the head she found Tom changed into his own super-comfy not-sexy pjs, making a nest of pillows and blankets on the floor in front of the couch. He’d replicated a huge bowl of ice cream and a small plate of fries to dip. He’d taught her that trick during their second dinner - before the great love confession - and now it was their thing. Like so many things were now their thing. And he stood there as she walked over, and instead of saying anything, he just opened his arms and wrapped her close against him. B’Elanna rested her head on his shoulder and slowly, ever so slowly, her breathing returned to normal. She counted her breaths in time with his heartbeat - in four, out four - until she was finally able to back away and curl up in the nest, her trusty Toby the Targ in her arms. “Okay,” she said. Tom took a seat next to her - not too close, but close enough that she could lean against him if she needed. She snagged a fry, dipped it in the chocolate ice cream, and popped it in her mouth. The salt and the sweet bonded together, exploding on her tongue. But, she couldn’t talk. She just couldn’t … how could she tell him? Where did she start?

“There’s this drive,” Tom said after a few long, silent moments of dipping fries into ice cream. “It’s in Southern Utah, this red rock desert. Back in the old United States, it was just outside of a park called Arches. A lot of the area was destroyed in the Third World War, but there’s still this drive and you go down this road and there’s all these twists and turns … and then you pull into this lot and there’s a trailhead. You go up this path and everything is all desert plant life but you follow the trail and it isn’t easy. You’re hugging a rock cliff for a while and you have to climb over this almost impossible pile of rocks that’s been like that for hundreds of years, maybe even before the war.” He took another fry and dipped it in the melting ice cream. “And you go up, and there’s this plateau that looks out over this whole canyon area. It’s stunning but that isn’t why you go on the hike.”

B’Elanna took a fry and leaned back against the couch, hugging Toby close and listening. She wanted to see this path, these rocks. Her experience with Earth was so limited. After all, it had never been her home. Her home was a colony that hadn't wanted her and a monastery that terrified her. Home had been a maquis camp. Home was Voyager.

“So, you keep going, and it isn’t a long hike. Maybe an hour, really. At most. And there’s the remains of this arch that probably stood until the war. It’s huge. What’s left of the history of the area says it was big enough to fly a small plane under it.”

“No wonder you love it so much.”

Tom smiled and offered her a fry. B’Elanna took it. “Actually, there’s another reason I love it.” He pulled one knee up and rested his elbow on it, his gaze falling somewhere between the blankets around them and some desert path back on Earth. “Right before you get to the arch, you look up and … there’s this … this crack in the rock. And you gotta understand how badly this place was ravaged by the climate issues in the twenty-first century. There already wasn’t a lot of water and then … but there was this tiny little drip of water and it formed this cavern and inside the rock, this tree grew from a crack in the ground. A scrub tree. With water all around it. Surviving on just this little drip of water in the middle of the desert. A tree designed for those harsh conditions but it shouldn’t have been out there in the middle of all that rock and there it was. There it is. It’s still there. Growing. Surviving. The arch fell but that tree is still there.” He took a breath and met her eyes again. “Maybe it’s dramatic to think this way, B’Elanna, but this whole thing, you surviving the way you do, it’s made me think of you in relation to that tree.”

Of course she was crying all over again. B’Elanna wiped her eyes and pushed the melting ice cream and congealing fries away. Leaning against Tom, she took his hand and kissed his fingers. “Thank you.”

He slid an arm around her. “You don’t have to talk to me about what's going on in your head,” he said. “But please don’t shut me out, either. Even if it's just the surface stuff.”

“I want to talk … I just … don’t know how.”

“Well, you open your mouth --”

She cut him off with a pinch to his waist. “I know. I know.” Silence again. She listened to his heartbeat, trying to put the visions and emotions into words that could possibly make sense. “I stopped letting myself feel anything,” she finally confessed. “But more than that, I feel like my brain just short circuited. Everything was … it is ... this numbing … fog. And the fog, it protects me from feeling these emotions I don’t want to feel. It stops me from being scared. But it stops me from being happy or in love or anything. I just … I don’t care.” She curled up even closer to him and he tightened his arms around her. “I feel like it’s safer not to care.”

“You’re so passionate, B’Elanna. I just … I can’t imagine what it’s like for you not to care. I’d rather have you screaming at everyone rather than just sitting there. You aren’t even sulking.”

“The Doctor gave me this diagnosis … one that would make any good Klingon’s skin fall off and they’d be turned away from Sto'Vo'Kor.”

“Depression?”

“Depression.” She groaned. “And there’s meds he can give me to help counteract the effects.”

“So what then? Why stop yourself from feeling better?”

Silence, and she let the question roll around her mind, replaying her conversation with Chakotay. “Because I don’t know how to handle it if this all happens again.”

“If what happens again?”

She sat up and met his eyes. Did he really not get it? Or was he just pushing her, prodding her, getting her to just talk? Either way, she was annoyed and needed to pace so she pushed off the floor and padded over to the replicator for a glass of water. She drank it in silence, petulantly didn’t offer Tom any, and finally turned back to him. “If I lose you, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“B’Elanna, you are not going to lose me.”

She let the words hang between them for a long time. “You can’t promise me that. All it will take is one good ion storm and half the consoles on the bridge will explode. What if you hit your head, break your neck? What if any one of the groups out there that hate us come and find us and fire on us and you don’t come back? What if the Delta Flyer goes down?” She took a breath. “And see, Tom, the thing is, I can rationalize those things happening. But I can’t face ever feeling like this again. I love you so much and if I lost you …” she choked on the tears that refused to leave her. Where was the brain fog when she needed it. “I can’t ever feel like this again. I just can’t.”

She watched the realization dawn on him, that she was mourning the family that was the maquis for her, and within that family, someone who had mattered to her. Someone she’d loved. He rose and walked over to her, taking her hands. “What was their name?”

The tears kept falling. Damnit. The tears just kept falling. “Kreshi. Joral Kreshi. She was …” her voice caught again and she pulled her hands away, sinking into the chair closest to the replicator. “She was the first person Chakotay introduced me to in the Maquis and she …” B’Elanna felt the hiccup come, the tears. Digging her nails into her arm, she gasped at the short burst of pain, and focused on the stars outside her viewports. “She fled Bajor during the Occupation and found a home on one of the worlds that got handed over to the Cardassians and she was so smart and pretty. God, you’d have loved her, you know. You’d have been racing each other in death trap planes by the end of the first day.”

Tom was kneeling in front of her now and B’Elanna reached out to stroke his cheek. “When we ended up here, I said my goodbyes to the hope of ever seeing her again. I really did. I never expected her to wait, either. We loved each other, but when you love someone, you also allow for them to move on. Kreshi wouldn’t have wanted me to be here, pining away. Actually, when I realized I had feelings for you, I started these series of letters for her, telling her all about you. Telling her how much she’d love you.” Tom caught her hand in his and kissed her palm. How long since he’d bitten her there? Since she’d wanted him to make her blood rise? Even now, despite the familiar stirring, the true desire lay dormant. “But now, Kreshi isn’t going to get those letters. She died when that damn Dominion went sweeping through the settlements. She died fighting for freedom from both the Cardassians and the Federation and here I am, wearing a Starfleet uniform and saying ‘Yes, Captain,’ when Janeway gives an order.”

“The nature of our circumstances doesn’t mean you’d have signed up for Starfleet again given the choice, B’Elanna.”

“I know. But … here I am. Here we are. Reporting for duty at oh-six-hundred and …” she wiped her eyes again. “And she doesn’t get to know that I found happiness.”

“Was Kreshi religious?”

B’Elanna raised an eyebrow. “Yes.”

“And what do the Bajorans believe happens after death?”

She swallowed. “They go to walk with the Prophets.”

“Then, she’s out there, with her Gods, in that wormhole Temple thing. And she survived the Occupation and she got to meet you and something tells me that Kreshi knows full well that you are happy and safe. Well, as happy and safe as you can be in a ship that needed to be put into dry dock a year ago and that always seems to be hunted by someone.”

The tone in his voice brought an actual chuckle to her heart and B’Elanna let the small laugh escape. “That’s a fair point.”

“And hell, she died thinking you got to cross to Sto'Vo'Kor. And yeah, if she’s waiting somewhere for you, it’s gonna be awkward, but it’s okay, B’Elanna. It’s okay to miss her and to love her and to mourn her. It doesn’t mean I love you any less or you love me any less or that we don’t live dangerous lives. You think I don’t worry every time you crawl into a jefferies tube or there’s an accident in engineering?”

“I’m just so scared of feeling like this forever. Of being scared to feel. I push the fog away for one night and I can’t stop crying.” Slowly, she wound her arms around his neck but instead of kissing him, B’Elanna just rested her head against his shoulder. “But I hate the fog. I don’t feel anything in there.”

“Like I said, your temper scares the hell out of me sometimes but it’s also a part of you. And I love you. Watching it fade away has been terrifying. Please stop pushing me away.”

B’Elanna sighed and pushed back, needing to pace again. He was right and she knew it but right now, she was just tired of talking and tired of confessions and tired of thinking about Kreshi and all of her dead family. There was so much to unpack and she just … she needed a break. Still, she turned to her lover and met his eyes. “I’m scared to go back to the Alpha Quadrant,” she confessed. A second for the night. Her distantly Catholic relatives were offering up penance as she spoke. “I’m a criminal, Tom. They threw the maquis who lived in prison. And if I go to prison I could …”

“We cross that bridge when we get there. If you think Janeway is going to let you twist in the wind just because she’s so Starfleet she can’t see straight …” he shrugged. “And we don’t have to go to Earth, you know.”

“You love it there.”

“There’s plenty of oceans to sail on other worlds.” He crossed to her and took her hands. “My plans for the future include you. Please don’t let that brain fog of yours cut me loose.”

She nodded. “I’ll do my best.” A breath. “I promise.” Another breath. “Anyway, I need to see your Paris and your Bucharest. The holodeck is fine and all, but … I want to see your world.” It killed her that she really didn’t have one of her own to show him.

“That’s all I ask.” He walked over to her and gently stroked his fingers down her cheek before leaning in for a kiss so soft and tender she was sure she’d imagined it at first. But his arms moved around her waist and she pressed into him and it was everything she needed. No rushing to undress or teeth sinking into skin. Just a promise not to forget that he loved her, and she loved him. “We’ve survived worse than this, B’Elanna.”

“We have?”

“It’s not every day you almost suffocate to death in the vastness of space, hoping your ship picks up a beacon before you completely die.”

That brought another small smile to her face. “Yeah, you’ve got a point.” She sighed and leaned against him again, suddenly so exhausted she could barely stand. All the raging and crying and confessing had taken everything out of her. “I’m sorry if you were hoping for anything else tonight but I’m just … I need to sleep for a while.”

He nodded. “Go on. I’ll clean up and see you in the morning.”

Instead, she took his hand. “The food can wait. Just come to bed. I’ll take care of it before my shift.”

“You want me to stay?”

“Tom,” she kissed him again, “get it through your head. I never want you to leave.”

He smiled and kissed her again, softly on her forehead, moving his lips across her ridges. “Let’s go to bed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Black Beauty
> 
> Pain added to pain it would have been,  
> to bring forward too soon  
> the beautiful unripe "us together" scenes.  
> So memory learned something from the dawn  
> about getting night out of the way,  
> letting dark be dark,  
> like the white heart of the apple  
> before it is broken open  
> to the miniature damp cathedral of its  
> even darker seeds. 
> 
> There we are again  
> on the side-throne of the King Cole Bar  
> eating goblets of raspberries in February  
> at the St. Regis Hotel. This was between  
> renovations, after the skating rink, before  
>  _Lespinasse_ , and yes, it's true - the demolition  
> of that very room. Like memory, or at least  
> its corridor - the mural of the King at court survives -  
> dim channel through which bowls of raspberries  
> were once conveyed. 
> 
> _Where were those berries picked?_ we ask, spooning  
> them info our far away, snow-drive  
> mouths. _Mexico, Chile._ And we know  
> some twelve-year-old, or younger, has gathered  
> them, forty pounds per hour, down the cool  
> morning vines, a carrier strapped  
> to the waist, hands reaching, palms up  
> to catch any falling ripeness - then,  
> each berry grasped lightly between thumb  
> and fingers, given a turn - no jerk  
> or pull - to loose it from the vine. 
> 
> I rest my spoon, watch Ray savor  
> our favorite fruit out of season,  
> like this poem written sixteen years after his death -  
> his 66th birthday. His pleasure is a red mountain  
> he scoops the top out of, like a crownless  
> king. Pleasure that had to traverse  
> unseemly diminishments and near deaths  
> find his lips and tongue and teeth  
> in New York City, some publisher  
> footing our bills, making it  
> the sweeter, berries so red they are nearly  
> black, like that variety we never  
> got to sample: _Black Beauty_ , said to be  
> "excellent and ever bearing." Like you. 
> 
> A long way from Clatskanie  
> to this posh place! Our raw beginnings:  
> from the logging camps of the Olympic Peninsula or  
> yours in Yakima, the only house on the block with  
> an outhouse. No car so you walked everywhere,  
> your father filing saws at Boise Cascade, you  
> working the green chain like my brothers  
> in our mill town across state. 
> 
> No wonder you can taste every one  
> of the 75 to 85 _druplets_ in one  
> raspberry crown. If I were to tell you  
> these berries had escaped _root weevil, two-spotted  
>  tortrix, cane maggot, spur blight, gray mold, _ and even  
> a wart-like growth: _crown gall_ \- from bacteria  
> entering the plant through a wound - you  
> would just take the next bite  
> and say, _I believe it._
> 
> One of the great things about living  
> longer, you said once, was _getting to learn more  
>  of the story_. The details left by the visitor  
> to your grave, how a man's ashes were  
> stolen in an urn, along with a white Cadillac  
> convertible. The powdery remains jostled along  
> in the back seat with joyriders. The car  
> then torched so the ashes had to pass again  
> through fire, and twice refined, washed downstream,  
> the car nosed by then into a river.  
> Or maybe we retell it  
> so the ashes are still riding around  
> in that stolen car, coaching life's desperados.  
> In any case, the top is down, under  
> a cargo of stars. 
> 
> _Now you're talking,_ Ray says - delight  
> and the story going on into  
> the imperishable _now_ of the never-again  
> raspberries he is consigning to his  
> one-and-only body beside me in that expansive,  
> gone-forever King Cole Bar.  
> Who said: _Raspberries do not keep  
>  or travel well?_ I'll stake my lot  
> with those ancient seafaring Chinese  
> who believed trees shed blood, or that to eat  
> the fruit of the 10,000 foot high Cassia tree  
> would make them immortal. 
> 
> _for Ray_
> 
> Black Beauty, by Tess Gallagher.
> 
> Dear Ghosts, available for purchase: https://bookshop.org/books/dear-ghosts/9781555974930


End file.
